


the voice under all silences

by toli-a (togina)



Category: Justified
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst with a Happy Ending, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-27
Updated: 2018-10-27
Packaged: 2019-08-08 15:07:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,068
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16431767
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togina/pseuds/toli-a
Summary: “A soulmate is …” Raylan’s mama trails off, stops walking. Raylan tries skipping backward around her, trips, and kicks himself in the knee. “They’re your conscience,” she finally says, and Raylan repeats the word, turning the unfamiliar weight of it over in his mouth. “That’s why you can hear them in your head.“A soulmate will help keep you on the right path,” Raylan’s mama promises, running her thin fingers through Raylan’s hair. “They’ll love you for exactly who you are, love you more than anybody.”“Hmph,” Raylan replies.





	the voice under all silences

**Author's Note:**

> This is one of many ideas that was spawned in part by Hiratha pointing out that there aren't really any soulmate AUs in the _Justified_ fandom, and some absolutely fabulous discussion on tumblr about possible soulmate AUs for Raylan and Boyd. In this one, you can hear your soulmate's voice in your head, as your conscience, an idea which is borrowed from a Brooklyn 99 Jake/Amy fanfiction that I'm sure I can find for you if you asked me.
> 
> The canon divergence is at the end of season one, because it seemed like the spot where things were most likely to change. This hasn't been beta'ed, so feel free to point out any errors I've made. Arlo is as miserable as he is in canon, and the pig story is pulled from season five.
> 
> The title is from e.e. cumming's poem, "being timeless as it's to time," which Boyd also quotes at the end of the fic. Poem printed in the notes at the end.

_No one’s gonna notice it’s missing_ , the voice in Raylan’s ear whispers. _The teacher can’t see you from here, and Sally Ann never uses more than half her crayons anyhow._

“Shut up,” Raylan hisses, kicking the boy sitting next to him. “I ain’t stealing Sally Ann’s crayons, no matter what you say.”

Boyd frowns, but not for long—he’d been talking about the picture he was drawing for his mama, a bear eating a robber, and some flowers in the corner because Mama liked flowers and he expected she’d like how well he’d drawn all the blood. His red crayon was clear down to the nub. He _wasn’t_ talking about stealing Sally Ann’s crayons, but he won’t deny that the box is sitting open for the taking, and she ain’t barely touched any of her _three_ kinds of red.

“Ms. Phillips can’t see us,” Boyd points out, keeps his head down because sometimes he ain’t as quiet as he thinks he is, and Ms. Phillips gets real mad and writes Boyd’s name on the chalkboard, or makes him nap somewhere that ain’t right next to Raylan. “And Sally Ann ain’t using them. She’s drawing a unicorn with a pink rainbow,” he adds, wrinkling his nose, “and you need the yellow for your monster’s teeth.”

Raylan and Boyd have been sharing the same box of twelve crayons since Kindergarten started, and they ran out of yellow last week when they’d both decided to draw exploding suns.

“It’s not a monster,” Raylan huffs, scowling at Boyd, his arm wrapped protectively around his picture. Boyd lifts up a little to see over Raylan’s arm, and it sure looks like a monster to him. “It’s a bear.”

“You can’t draw a bear,” Boyd tells him, crossing his arms. “ _I’m_ drawing a bear. Eating a robber. See?” He holds up the picture, points triumphantly at the blood. “Mama’s gonna put this one on the fridge.”

“That’s dumb.”

 _Are you gonna hit him?_ Raylan wonders, and Boyd can hear him loud and clear even though he ain’t said a word. _He called your picture dumb. You’re gonna hit him, ain’t you?_

“You’re dumb,” Boyd snaps, sticking out his chin and blinking hard. “But I ain’t gonna hit you. You’d probably cry to Ms. Phillips.”

“I would not!” Raylan hollers, loud enough that Ms. Phillips lifts her head up and says, “Boys!” sounding short and tired the way she always does when Boyd fights with Raylan.

“Sorry, Ms. Phillips,” they mumble, shuffling apart and bending their heads over their desk.

“I would not cry,” Raylan whispers, after the teacher’s gone back to marking the clocks they all drew that morning. “I bet you can’t even hit hard. I bet my daddy hits harder than you.”

“I bet my daddy hits harder than your daddy,” Boyd retorts, because Daddy always says Crowders are best at everything they do.

“He does not!”

“ _Boys!_ Do I need to come over there?”

“No, ma’am,” they shout, and Raylan can’t tell if Boyd says “look what you done now” out loud or just in his head. Raylan elbows Boyd hard, then ignores him in favor of looking through their remaining crayons to try and find a color for the bear’s teeth.

 _Yellow would be awesome_ , Boyd tells him, and Raylan tries hard to ignore that, too. _Yellow monster teeth are the best_.

 _It’s not a monster,_ Raylan thinks back, his lower lip jutting out, _it’s a_ bear.

But Boyd’s right, yellow _would_ be the best. And it ain’t like Sally Ann ever uses anything but silver and pink and purple for her hundreds of unicorns. Raylan’s hand darts out quick, snatching at Sally Ann’s crayon box before anyone can see.

“Here,” he says, shoving the red crayon he’d grabbed over to Boyd’s half of the desk. He doesn’t say that Boyd’s stupid picture needs more blood, even though it _does_. Sometimes when he says things like that, Boyd in his head starts sounding like Raylan’s mama when she’s _disappointed_ that he’s fighting again.

“Thanks,” Boyd says, finally, and takes the crayon. “I guess you can draw a bear, too.”

“Maybe it’s a monster bear,” Raylan concedes, follows it up by drawing enormous, sharp teeth.

“ _Those are the neatest monster teeth_ ever _,_ ” Boyd tells him, says it out loud and in Raylan’s head the way he does sometimes, overlapping his thoughts with his voice whispering in Raylan’s ears.

Raylan grins.

 _Maybe you could give Raylan your picture instead_ , Raylan says quiet in Boyd’s head, because every time Raylan grins Boyd wants to hand over his favorite bouncy ball and his French fries and he sort of wants to step on Raylan’s toes and pull his hair.

“I guess you could have this picture,” Boyd sighs. “Since it’s got a bear and a robber, too.” Raylan tilts his head and keeps smiling, so Boyd does the only thing he can do: he reaches out and pulls hard on Raylan’s hair.

* * *

“Raylan, let’s you and I have a talk,” Raylan’s mama declares, one fine Sunday after church, both of them all dressed up and making the long walk home, because Raylan’s daddy went somewhere with the car.

“Okay,” Raylan agrees, hopping forwards with both feet and then skipping ahead, turning and hopping back toward his mama before she can tell him to mind. “’Bout Sunday school?” he wonders, because Mama always asks about Sunday school, makes sure Raylan’s paying attention to the teacher when she talks about the lions or the tigers or the flood.

“Not about Sunday school,” she says, and something in her voice makes Raylan squint up at her. His mama is the prettiest girl in the world. Boyd thinks so, too, sometimes. Sometimes he says _his_ mama’s the prettiest girl in the world, and then Raylan punches him for lying before the teacher makes him apologize and say that Mrs. Crowder is pretty, too.

“I want to talk about the voice you hear in your head,” she says, and Raylan frowns, confused. “I mean,” she tries to clarify, waving her hands at the air like she does when she’s telling stories about all the animals that live up in the hills, “sometimes when you’re by yourself, do you hear a someone telling you to do good?”

“No, Mama.” Raylan shakes his head. “Sometimes Alma Lee tattles to Ms. Phillips when I hit Boyd. Is it like that?”

“Alma Lee Hendricks?” his mama wonders, sounding a little out of breath, and Raylan chews on his thumb and nods. “And do you hear her sometimes when you’re at home?”

Raylan shakes his head again. “Why would I hear her at home?” he asks. “She don’t live anywhere near us,” he points out, because Alma Lee Hendricks ain’t a Randolph or a Givens or a McCleary or a Crowder. “And I don’t want her to come over and play!” he adds, eyes wide. Sometimes his mama thinks Raylan ought to bring more kids home from school, and sometimes she makes him play with little Ava Randolph down the street, even though Ava’s only _two_. Raylan doesn’t want to have to play with a tattletale like Alma Lee Hendricks, too.

“Oh,” his mama says, and Raylan can’t tell if she sounds happy or sad. “Well, all right. Maybe your soulmate hasn’t been born yet. You’ll hear them soon, though.”

“What’s a soulmate?” Raylan asks, sliding the tip of his thumb up into the gap left by his missing tooth. He’s heard grown-ups use the word before, Ms. Phillips and Mrs. Drummey the Sunday school teacher and Mr. Perkins the principal at the school. Sometimes Raylan’s daddy uses it, but it never sounds very nice when he does.

“A soulmate is …” Raylan’s mama trails off, stops walking. Raylan tries skipping backward around her, trips, and kicks himself in the knee. “They’re your conscience,” she finally says, and Raylan repeats the word, turning the unfamiliar weight of it over in his mouth. “That’s why you can hear them in your head.”

“What’s a conscience?”

“It’s what tells you to be good. Who do you hear telling you to do your schoolwork and not bother your teacher or get into fights?”

Sometimes Raylan’s mama shouts about getting into fights, and sometimes Daddy tans Raylan’s hide for getting into trouble at school. Ms. Phillips don’t like the fighting much either, but Boyd says what Ms. Phillips don’t know could fill the whole room.

“Boyd likes schoolwork,” he tells her, because Boyd’s always betting Raylan on who can finish their worksheet first, lords it over Raylan all day when he wins. “But he likes fighting, too.”

 _Let’s show Ikey Helton what a Givens can do_ , Boyd whispered in Raylan’s head, and Raylan had made Ikey’s nose bleed before Ms. Phillips pulled him away and called his mama.

“That’s not quite what a conscience does,” Mama declares, rubbing the bridge of her nose. “Though I pity the poor child who has Boyd Crowder whispering in their ear.”

Raylan doesn’t think Boyd whispers to anyone else besides Raylan, but he doesn’t tell Mama that. They get in enough trouble for fighting. Raylan doesn’t want to get into trouble for whispering, too.

“A soulmate will help keep you on the right path,” Raylan’s mama promises, running her thin fingers through Raylan’s hair. “They’ll love you for exactly who you are, love you more than anybody.”

“Hmph,” Raylan replies. Nobody loves Raylan more than Mama does, he thinks, and Boyd agrees.

His mama looks down at him and smiles, shakes his head and taps the end of his nose. “You’ll understand when you’re older,” she tells him, rubbing at a smudge on his cheek. “Once you hear your soulmate, it’ll all become clear.”

* * *

By eleven, Raylan knows enough about soulmates to know that Arlo must have been born without one, because there wasn’t a soul alive that could love Arlo Givens, and he clearly didn’t have a better half whispering good in his ear. Raylan also knows that he hates his mama’s soulmate, wherever they are. She’s run off to Nobles again. She’ll come back, he knows. She always comes back. “My soulmate always tells me to come back to you,” she says, smiling, and Raylan thinks a good soulmate would have told his mama not to leave him at all. To take him with her when she goes.

Boyd thinks so, too, both of him, the one in Raylan’s head and the one that sits in detention with Raylan after school. Raylan’s gotten used to hearing Boyd Crowder’s opinion on everything from the mystery lunch meat in the cafeteria to Arlo’s right hook, and it’s still sometimes hard to tell if he’s learned it from the Boyd in his head or the one constantly chattering in his ear.

Boyd doesn’t think he should shoot the feral pig, but he knows that Raylan’s gotta. _Pig never dealt you any wrong_ , Boyd hisses. _Why can’t Arlo shoot it, when he’s the one who wants it dead?_

 _You know why_ , Raylan thinks, and his conscience lets out an irritated huff.

Arlo cuffs Raylan across the temple for taking too long. “What are you waiting for, boy? The Rapture?” Then he raises both eyebrows and laughs, short and hard. “Oh, it’s your soulmate, ain’t it? You got some girl whimpering in your ear, begging you not to kill a poor, innocent pig.”

Raylan doesn’t think Boyd would appreciate being called a girl, but he’s not about to tell his daddy that it’s Boyd Crowder whimpering in his ear instead.

“Soulmates ain’t worth shit,” Arlo informs him, spitting, when Raylan doesn’t make a move to reply or to shoot the pig between its beady eyes, or to shoot Arlo between his. “They ain’t even really in your head. All you hear is your own pussy self, wanting to run and hide.”

Raylan doesn’t think that’s quite right. The Boyd Crowder in detention with Raylan doesn’t know what the Boyd Crowder in Raylan’s head is saying, true enough, but Raylan doubts he’d consider setting fire to the teacher’s desk all on his own. Boyd had lit up like fireworks when Raylan had suggested it aloud, declared, “I have the best ideas!” and pulled a matchbox out of his desk.

“Just shoot the goddamned pig, Raylan,” his daddy demands, and Raylan’s hands shake as he checks the gun. “The only voice you’d better hear in your damn head right now is mine.”

 _Maybe it won’t be so heinous an act if you close your eyes_ , Boyd offers hopefully.

He’s wrong. Closing his eyes just makes Raylan miss, and there’s blood everywhere but the pig ain’t dead and he’s got to shoot again and everything’s shifting and shaking there’s _blood_ and his ears are ringing and his hands are slipping on the gun and finally, _finally_ –

“I always knew you were a pussy,” Arlo says, once it’s done. “Now help me hoist her up, so’s we can drain her and take her on down to Frellin’s for the meat.”

Raylan throws up in his mama’s marigolds. _Your daddy’s an asshole_ , Boyd declares, and Raylan doesn’t disagree.

* * *

Raylan never does tell his mama, even once he gets old enough to understand that the Boyd Crowder whispering in his ear and the Boyd Crowder whispering in his head aren’t exactly one and the same.

He never tells anyone, including Boyd, but it ain’t like Boyd doesn’t know.

“If I heeded your counsel, Raylan,” Boyd announces, coming in to homeroom ten minutes late and draping his arm over Raylan’s shoulders, acting like he’s been sitting next to Raylan and chattering away the whole time, “my life would be one ceaseless brawl.”

Of course, Raylan did not begin his morning by suggesting that Boyd ought to fight anyone, but he knows what Boyd means. The Boyd in Raylan’s head is constantly trying to get him to filch bubblegum and cigarettes, egging him on to commit petty larceny and arson and occasionally—when faced with Dickie Bennett—assault and battery. Frances Givens’s soulmate might keep her on the right path, but Boyd’s doing his level best to land Raylan in juvenile detention.

“Is that why you’re late?” he wonders, doesn’t lean back into Boyd, doesn’t feel Boyd’s fingers curl briefly around his shoulder and squeeze. “Been getting into fights on my advice?”

“On your account, more like,” Boyd retorts, taps his fingers in a staccato rhythm on Raylan’s upper arm. “You going to reward me for defending your good name?”

“What sort of reward would you be angling for?” Raylan wonders, feels his pulse race skywards like one of those rockets Boyd was always blowing up as a kid, trying to get a message to the moon.

They don’t talk about _soulmates_ , he and Boyd, about what everyone says it means to hear someone else in your head. All the books Raylan has read and his mama and even his cynical Aunt Helen seem to believe that somewhere out there, someone with your conscience’s voice lives and loves you beyond all reckoning. _Don’t you expect to find them_ , they all warn, wagging their fingers and shaking their heads. _Not in this lifetime_. It’s enough to know they’re out there, they say, and no one says a word about what it means when you spend every damn day with the voice in your head also whispering in your ear.

They don’t talk about the fact that Boyd murmurs, _You’d be the most spectacular thing that ever happened to him_ , and it’s always the strangest thing when Boyd talks about himself.

Boyd shrugs, looks away. “You could win tonight’s game and make me a bundle,” he declares, and Raylan blames his disappointment on the fact that the Boyd in his head would have asked for Raylan to steal sunflower seeds from the corner store, asked him to light the Bennett’s truck on fire, or maybe asked him for something more.

“I’d better be getting a cut of those winnings,” is all Raylan says, and they don’t talk about the arm Boyd’s left around Raylan’s shoulders, or all the words they whisper that neither of them ever say.

* * *

“I dearly wish you’d shut your fucking mouth, Raylan Givens,” Boyd hisses, both of them standing in a corner of the First Baptist cemetery in their ill-fitting suits, surrounded by other men in store-bought suits and coal-scarred hands, women in black they’ve donned before. Death ain’t new to Harlan County; this dirge is one that they’ve all sung.

Raylan hasn’t said anything since they got to the church for the funeral. Raylan hasn’t said anything in three days, not since Boyd came out shouting “fire in the hole!” and the mountains shook and the mine caved around them as they ran.

He can only imagine what he’s whispering in Boyd’s head, though. No doubt it’s what he’s been thinking since he saw a slab of rock the size of a horse nearly land on Boyd’s head. _Run, dammit,_ run _. C’mon, c’mon, we have to run!_ But they made it out of the mine and Boyd stopped running and Raylan doesn’t understand why, doesn’t know why they’re still in Harlan when by now they should be a thousand miles away.

“We have to leave,” Raylan says, whispering like he could speak the words straight into Boyd’s heart. “Today it’s Briggs’s funeral. You want to wait around for ours?”

Boyd doesn’t flinch. Raylan supposes Boyd’s spent the last seven years walking through the Givenses’ yard, passed Raylan’s tombstone more than a thousand times—he must be inured to the thought of them lying cold in the ground.

“We don’t have to dig coal,” Boyd says, and it’s a promise he’s tried to make before. “There are plenty of other things we could do without running scared.”

If he’s trying to draw Raylan into a fight by calling him coward, it ain’t going to work. Raylan saw how Boyd’s hands shook for hours after they stumbled out of the mine, sat beside him while Boyd murmured, “Christ, _Raylan,_ ” over and over while guzzling whiskey and then puking it up over the side of the truck.

“Other things like working for our daddies?” Raylan wonders, the words sharp with spite. “You want me to pick my old bat up and start breaking knees?” Raylan thinks of the sound Dickie Bennett made, the way he’d screamed when Raylan had swung and felt the bat crunch through bone. “You want us to go to prison for stealing? You want us to get killed running cocaine? There ain’t a damn thing for us in Harlan and you know it, Boyd. Why don’t you listen to me for once?”

“I have always listened to you!” Boyd snaps, rounding on Raylan and poking a finger at his chest. Raylan steps backward and nearly trips over a tombstone trying to put some distance between himself and Boyd’s fury. “I have hearkened to your every charge, Raylan. I have obeyed all your decrees, because …” His forefinger is pressed into Raylan’s chest. Raylan can feel Boyd’s every exhale across his own lips, can feel the heat of Boyd’s body pressed close to his. Boyd doesn’t say why he’s obeyed, but Raylan can hear his mama chiding him to always do what his soulmate says, can hear the promise that there’s only good waiting for him if he does right by the one who loves him most. “But this is our _home_ , Raylan. I won’t forsake the place where I was raised.” _For you_ , he doesn’t add, but it lingers in the air between them.

 _You could stay_ , Boyd whispers, soft where the real Boyd is spitting mad, silken where the Boyd in front of Raylan has gone rough around the edges, his eyes still red from the coal dust of the collapse and the tears he thought he’d hid. _Would it really be so terrible, Raylan Givens, if you stayed? Just abide for a little while longer, and then you could sway him into joining you for whatever misadventures you have devised._

 _You’d be the most spectacular thing that ever happened to him_ , Boyd had promised, and Boyd is right there in front of Raylan, and Raylan wants to lean forward, right there in the First Baptist churchyard, and press all the things they never say right into Boyd’s thin lips. He wants to kiss Boyd. He wants to punch him. He wants to stay.

Frances’s soulmate always tells her to stay, and so she never runs too far. She comes home to Raylan; she comes home to Arlo. She makes the same decision every time, and every time she pays.

 _This ain’t the same_ , Boyd breathes, and Raylan closes his eyes to blink the tears away. “I have to leave,” he says, chokes the words out in barely a whisper and watches them slam into Boyd as if he had shouted them, as if he had fired them from a gun.

Boyd falls back a step, and Raylan’s whole body aches to feel him go.

“You can’t,” Boyd tells him, shaking his head as if Raylan’s words are a fly he could swat away. “Raylan, we’re -”

He doesn’t say the word. They’ve never said the word. Maybe if they’d said it, Boyd would come with Raylan and they could run away. Maybe if they’d said it, Raylan would stay.

“We’re dying here,” Raylan says, gazing at Boyd’s slicked back hair, a few strands poking up in the back, gazing at Boyd’s face and trying desperately to pin down the color of his eyes, the slant of his nose and the curl of his lips, trying to map all the contours of Boyd’s face so that he always has a way home. “And I won’t stay to fill my grave.” _Or watch you fill yours_ , he doesn’t say, but he has a feeling he whispers it to Boyd just the same.

Raylan watches Boyd’s face, watches the shock of Raylan leaving try to coalesce into rage before cracking into something worse than the collapse of a mine, worse than running out of your own grave. Raylan thinks it might be grief, because the Boyd in his head is shouting _You can’t_ with a jaggedness that sounds like tears.

“Goodbye, Boyd,” Raylan whispers. He reaches out and wraps his hand around the finger Boyd still has resting against his chest, thinks of them holding hands and running for their lives only three days past. He squeezes Boyd’s finger tightly, then sets his jaw, swallows roughly, and lets go.

For the first time in his life, Raylan disobeys his conscience. At nineteen, he turns his back on his soulmate, and he walks away.

* * *

“Man, your soulmate must be vicious,” Deputy Carlson says, the first time a fugitive draws on them and Raylan shoots to kill. “I thought they were supposed to tell you _not_ to kill folks.”

Actually, Boyd had shouted: _Christ’s sake, Raylan, shoot the bastard! Can’t you see he’s reaching for a goddamned gun?_

Boyd always did love watching folks, could tell a person was about to pull the way Raylan could calculate the trajectory of a clenched fist or a baseball bat.

Raylan shrugs. “They saved your life, didn’t they?” he replies, holstering his gun. “Besides, a conscience ain’t nothing but a voice in your goddamned head.”

“Tell that to my wife,” Carlson chuckles, slapping Raylan on the shoulder.

 _Tell his wife that he’s an adulterer_ , Boyd suggests, sharp and gleeful. _Since the voice in his goddamned head clearly ain’t sufficient to keep him on the narrow way._

 _Oh, like you’re keeping me on the narrow way?_ Raylan thinks, because twenty years of Boyd Crowder at his side and Boyd Crowder in his head accustomed him to always reply. _I just killed a man_.

 _You just killed a criminal_ , Boyd points out, reasonably. _And look at you, Raylan Givens. You’re a_ marshal _. You’re a law man. I have done an astounding job directing your steps to the strait gate, if I do say so myself._

Raylan tries not to think of the real Boyd Crowder, most days, tries not to close his eyes and see Boyd standing in a graveyard, watching Raylan walk away. It ain’t the easiest thing in the world, when he can still hear Boyd rambling on in his head, but after six years he’s mostly managed to separate the voice from the man.

You can’t do shit about the voice in your head, after all. Same way you couldn’t force your soulmate to come with you, or convince them to stay.

“Givens? You paying attention?”

“Sure am.” Raylan shakes his head, shakes away the image of Boyd Crowder at nineteen, and goes to do his job.

* * *

Winona’s soulmate is some woman with a Kentucky accent who’s been raised up in a harder place than Winona ever was.

“I sure hope I give her better advice than she gives me,” Winona complains, after telling Raylan that her soulmate suggested shooting him if he ever did her wrong.

Raylan thinks it’s good advice, and Boyd agrees. Winona likes that Raylan’s soulmate is a man, the way hers is a woman, likes it even better that Raylan ain’t interested in finding his soulmate and setting up house.

“I’d much rather set up house with a beautiful woman,” Raylan says, arches his eyebrows and drags his gaze up Winona from her high heels to her curled hair. She blushes and laughs, and he hears Kentucky in her laughter, hears home in the sound of her voice.

She never says it, but Raylan always wonders if that’s half the reason Winona marries him, both of them aching for someone to talk to who sounds like home, some place to hear Kentucky that ain’t just in their heads.

* * *

He shoots Tommy Bucks, and Boyd approves. Dan doesn't, though, and so they ship him back to Kentucky to atone for his sins.

And it ain't where Raylan wanted to be, but he knows the way to Harlan, knows it better than the office GPS, knows the bloody homage it demands.

 _And so the prodigal son returns to his father’s house!_ Boyd whoops, and thank God Art keeps talking about a man dead in a Jeep and doesn't ask about the smile creeping up on Raylan's face.

And thank God Art ain't there to see Raylan grinning when he steps out of his car and Boyd Crowder strides out of the church, real for the first time in twenty years.

"Look at you!" Boyd declares, and it's the same voice Raylan's heard every day his whole life through; it shouldn't feel like it's been forever since he last heard Boyd speak. "A suit, a necktie. Looking good. Looking like a lawman."

 _Kept you on the right path_ , Boyd thinks triumphantly, and he's going to lord that over Raylan for days.

"Have you finally come to charge me in person for my crimes?" Boyd asks, once he's evicted his shitkicker buddy from the room, says it lightly, like it ain't nothing that Raylan's there in front of him, like Raylan's been there listening to Boyd ramble for the past twenty years.

"You saying I ain't been telling you _not_ to rob banks and blow shit up?" Raylan retorts, and Boyd laughs, leans forward and rests his hand on Raylan's arm.

Raylan doesn't think of the churchyard, doesn’t think of _I have obeyed your every decree_. Boyd’s come a long way since then, if he’s turned into the kind of man in Art’s file.

"Now, Raylan, you have never minded me blowing shit up." And, well, that’s true enough. Raylan can still see Boyd’s face shadowed in the mines, his mile-wide smile and the exuberant cry of “fire in the hole!”

“Did I mind you becoming a racist asshole?” Raylan asks casually. Boyd’s gotten cagier in the past two decades, and he doesn’t flinch, but he can’t hide the way his jaw tightens, the way his gaze cuts to the right. Clearly, Boyd’s conscience—Raylan’s voice—has had it out with Boyd about his white supremacist aspirations before. Raylan hums smugly, knows Boyd can hear him, and hopes the Raylan Givens in Boyd’s head is hollering triumphantly about how he _told you all along, didn’t I? I told you that this shit wouldn’t stand_.

Either the Raylan in Boyd’s head or the Raylan standing in front of him for the first time since 1989 persuades Boyd to come down to the courthouse tomorrow, and so Raylan’s work in Harlan is done.

“How’s Arlo?” Boyd asks, because Boyd never did surrender to anything without a fight.

 _This is mere speculation on my part_ , Boyd interrupts, irksome as ever, _but he might stop talking if you kissed him._

 _He might not_ , Raylan growls silently, because unlike Boyd, he can hold a conversation with his conscience without speaking every word of it aloud. _And ain’t it your job to make sure I_ don’t _consort with neo-Nazi skinheads?_

Boyd doesn’t have anything to say to that, and Raylan stares at the swastika on the real Boyd Crowder’s arm and a ball of irrational, unwanted guilt congeals in his throat, faced with this evidence that his voice wasn’t enough to keep Boyd on the right path. Maybe neither of them have turned out to be the kind of soulmates Raylan’s mama hoped they could be.

“I sowed the wind, Raylan,” Boyd says, seeing Raylan’s gaze linger over the tattoo. “The whirlwind is mine to reap.”

“You sure it ain’t going to swallow you up?”

Raylan tips his hat back and walks away before Boyd can answer, leaves the question echoing in the doorway, leaves the click of his boots fading behind him as he goes.

 

And twenty years has gone by, so instead of telling Raylan that he has to stay Boyd is trying to run him out of Harlan County and clear across the Kentucky line. Raylan is more than willing to go, doesn’t want to hear Boyd pontificating in his head about how perhaps the real Raylan Givens could save the real Boyd Crowder’s soul.

 _It ain’t on me to save him_ , Raylan insists, because Boyd’s a full-grown man with his own long list of sins to be counted against him on Judgment Day. _Ain’t it, though?_ Boyd whispers, mournful and low. _Ain’t it always been on you to keep him right?_

Raylan tells himself that a soulmate is just noise in your head, nothing more, with none of the mystical power his mama described. It’s nothing but your own thoughts in someone else’s voice, no greater meaning, no cosmic pull. He’s spent two decades away from Boyd Crowder, after all, and his conscience was never enough to draw him back. But –

“If you heeded my counsel,” he says, fried chicken in one hand and the other on his gun and Ava Crowder’s dining room table between them, Raylan’s badge and Boyd’s tattoos and his clenched jaw and his silver Colt all between them in air so thick that Raylan could chew it like jerky if he tried. “If you heeded my counsel, what would you do now?”

Boyd’s eyes widen; he presses both hands flat on the table, looks like he might push himself to his feet and stand. His face softens for a fraction of a second, but it’s long enough that Raylan thinks he might get a straight answer, finally, that maybe Boyd will follow his conscience for the first time in twenty years.

Then Ava comes out with the shotgun, and it all goes to hell.

* * *

“Did I say something to you?” Boyd wonders, high on painkillers and an inch from having filled his grave.

 _You’re always saying something to me_ , Raylan thinks, but he says, “You’re asking me if you told me to miss?” He shakes his head, doesn’t lean into the hand Boyd’s placed limply over his. “Boyd, you tell me never to miss. I believe you call it damned mortifying whenever I do.”

 _That’s because it is_ , Boyd insists, but he hasn’t censured Raylan once for missing Boyd Crowder’s heart.

It’s impossible to know if Boyd believes him. It’s impossible to know whether Raylan believes himself, Boyd’s clammy hand on his and Boyd only a few feet away, wan but alive in a prison hospital bed.

Raylan walks away before Boyd can pry any further. And it tears at Raylan to turn his back on Boyd, when the day before Boyd was bleeding out under Raylan’s hands. It’s always cracked Raylan’s chest down the middle to walk away from Boyd. Until he was nineteen, he didn’t know it was something he could do.

But it is. Raylan leaves Boyd and Boyd finds God and Raylan tries not to think about the fact that Boyd’s God can keep him on the straight and narrow when his soulmate never could.

Then Boyd loses God and goes looking for Raylan. Raylan tries not to take any satisfaction in that, doesn’t smirk at God and think, _take that, Heavenly Father_.

“Do you believe in God?” Boyd asks, forlorn and lost on the seat beside Raylan as they drive to Harlan, grave dirt worked into his jeans like coal dust and blisters on his hands. He could be nineteen again, just off a shift at the mine—only Boyd at nineteen was never uncertain, never once doubted himself or his plans.

“I do,” Raylan answers, doesn’t need to look over to know Boyd’s watching his face for any hint of a lie.

“Do you think He erred,” Boyd follows one question with another, the same desolate note in his voice, “when He made us soulmates?”

Raylan’s daddy tried to kill him a few hours ago, and now it seems like Boyd’s trying to do the same. “I don’t think God makes mistakes,” Raylan says levelly, and doesn’t punch Boyd in the chest the way it feels like Boyd’s hit him. The first time Boyd ever says the word, and he asks if maybe they ain’t meant to be.

It’s a far cry from everything Raylan’s mama promised when she said his soulmate would love him best of all. But Boyd had chosen his home over his soulmate, at nineteen. It was Boyd who’d chosen to stay and turn against his conscience and turn to crime.

 _You made your own choices, Raylan Givens_ , Boyd declares, and Raylan knows he ain’t wrong. They drive in silence for a while.

Then Boyd says, “If you don’t believe it to be an error on His part, then how do you justify disobedience?”

“You mean how do I justify leaving?” Raylan amends, gripping the wheel and staring intently at the road ahead, though he knows it like he knows the color of Boyd’s eyes, the length of his fingers and the grip of his hands. “I don’t know, Boyd. The same way I don’t know how you could justify making me stay.

“A conscience is just a voice in your head,” he says, after a pause where he can feel Boyd’s gaze on him like a yoke. “Whether God puts it there or fate or aliens—” which had been Boyd’s favorite theory as a child obsessed with Star Wars and space travel “—it’s up to us to choose our own path.”

“What if a man chooses wrongly?” Boyd replies, and Raylan glances away from the road to watch the distant look in Boyd’s eyes. “What if he is operating under the fallacious assumption that home is a holler, a place with bass in the creek and bluebirds in the trees and moonshine in the jar?”

“I’d say that man had listened to too many folk songs,” Raylan replies, but his heart beats a little faster in his chest.

“ _What if a conscience ain’t just a voice in your head?_ ” Boyd asks, out loud and in Raylan’s head the way he always used to do when they were kids. “ _What if it’s a home?_ ”

“Are you saying you’d make a different choice?” Raylan asks hoarsely, fingertips white where he’s clutching the steering wheel and unable to look Boyd in the eye, _I won’t forsake the place where I was raised_ echoing through his head like Boyd had said it seconds instead of decades before. “Because you seemed quite certain at the time, Boyd.”

“I’m saying that if we choose our own paths, well,” Boyd pauses, and Raylan feels his insides tremble at the wait, at the weight of the words unsaid in Boyd’s mouth, “I’m saying, Raylan, that I know the choice I would make.”

They don’t say anything, after that, because they arrive at Ava’s house and there’s Johnny half-dead and there’s work to be done, but a few hours later there’s Boyd shot in the shoulder and holding a gun on Raylan and it ain’t the first time Boyd’s threatened Raylan, ain’t even the first time this year, and it’s Boyd’s choice and it shouldn’t hurt like Raylan’s nineteen and being disowned by his soulmate for the first time, it shouldn’t –

“You choose your own path, Boyd,” Raylan says softly, and he thinks he might be saying the same thing in Boyd’s head. “You gonna shoot me, so’s you can avenge your daddy? That the choice you want to make today?”

Boyd looks at his daddy, dead in the cabin’s front yard, and he looks at the gun in his shaking hand. Then he looks at Raylan, and shakes his head.

“I’m so tired,” he says, and Raylan has to strain to hear him, Boyd talking softer than he ever has. “Raylan, I’m so tired of all of this. Do you mean it, when you say that there’s forgiveness in more than just the Bible? Do you mean it, about coming home?”

Boyd had lost his God, that day, lost the forgiveness he’d sought for twenty years of going against the conscience he’d denied. And Raylan hasn’t said a word about forgiveness, not aloud, but Boyd never had kicked the habit of talking to the Raylan in his head and the Raylan in front of him as if they were one and the same.

“When have I ever lied to you?” Raylan wonders, and it makes Boyd chuckle, just a breath of air in the stillness around them. It makes Boyd drop his arm and let go of the gun. “Let’s find Ava and get you to a hospital,” he declares, and doesn’t say a word when Boyd comes up to stand beside him, close enough that their shoulders brush each time one of them inhales. Finding Gio’s woman will have to wait awhile, Raylan supposes, but Boyd breathes in and his arm jostles Raylan’s and Raylan thinks that maybe that’s all right.

 

After—after they get Ava home and get Boyd to Harlan County General and get back to Lexington and a fresh motel room without any blood—Raylan lets Boyd in and follows behind and finds himself crowded against the motel door, Boyd’s face inches from his and Boyd pressed close against him from shoulders to boots.

Boyd ain’t quiet in Raylan’s head, exactly. He never is. However, he seems to be demonstrating a yet unseen measure of self-restraint, and is limiting his commentary to a few delighted war whoops.

“Do you believe in soulmates?” Raylan asks softly, watches the word brush over Boyd’s face, his chapped lips and the stubble on his cheeks. Boyd lost his God last night, lost his faith and lost his vengeance and Raylan wonders what Boyd has left now, with all of that taken away.

Boyd smiles, and Raylan feels the heat of it hit his belly like a swig of moonshine. “Raylan Givens,” he says, ladling Raylan’s name out slow, his smile growing wider over the words, “I believe you’re the most spectacular thing that’s ever happened to me.”

Raylan laughs, can’t help it, laughs at Boyd’s bemused look and leans forward the way he’d wanted to at nineteen, presses his nose to Boyd’s and stays so close he has to cross his eyes to look Boyd in the eye. “Well, I already knew that,” he whispers, close enough to feel Boyd’s eyebrows raise. “You’ve been telling me that for years.”

“Then you ought to do what your mama always said, and listen to your conscience,” Boyd tells him, smirking against Raylan’s lips.

“All right,” Raylan agrees, and his conscience has spent decades suggesting that Raylan kiss Boyd Crowder quiet, so he does.

 _See,_ Raylan says quietly in Boyd’s ear, the voice that’s never forsaken Boyd, not even in his darkest days. Raylan curls a hand over where the tattoo lies black and damning on Boyd’s arm, presses his other hand to the scar he put on Boyd’s chest. _I told you he’d forgive you, if you asked him._

“And of course you’re never wrong,” Boyd replies into Raylan’s mouth, and it makes the real Raylan smile. Boyd has the sudden urge to step on Raylan’s toes, to pull his hair like they’re both five years old and his greatest worry is that he doesn’t have all of Raylan’s attention all of the time.

“I never am,” Raylan assures him, pulls back far enough that Boyd can see his eyes sparkling with laughter. _Not about this. Just because you’ve been ignoring me, Boyd Crowder, it don’t mean I’m wrong. I told you twenty years ago that you’d regret letting him walk away._

“I didn’t know, then,” Boyd tells them both, distracts Raylan from where he’s unbuttoning Boyd’s shirt to kiss around the edges of his fresh wound, to linger over his scars. “I didn’t know.”

“Didn’t know what, Boyd?” Raylan asks patiently, because the Boyd in Raylan’s head is whispering about love being the truth more first than sun, more last than star, and neither of them are making any sense.

“I know now, though,” Boyd says, his voice firm, cupping Raylan’s face in his hands and drawing him in for another kiss. “And I ain’t letting you get away.”

Maybe they were never the kind of soulmates Frances had hoped for. Maybe Raylan couldn’t keep Boyd on the straight and narrow, and maybe they’d both lashed out and walked away. But Raylan’s mama had always said that your soulmate would love you beyond all reckoning, and Raylan takes Boyd to bed and thinks _home_ and Boyd whispers, “ _Christ, Raylan,_ ” and Raylan knows they got the most important part right, after all.

**Author's Note:**

> being to timelessness as it’s to time
> 
> being to timelessness as it’s to time,  
> love did no more begin than love will end;  
> where nothing is to breathe to stroll to swim  
> love is the air the ocean and the land
> 
> (do lovers suffer? all divinities  
> proudly descending put on deathful flesh:  
> are lovers glad? only their smallest joy’s  
> a universe emerging from a wish)
> 
> love is the voice under all silences,  
> the hope which has no opposite in fear;  
> the strength so strong mere force is feebleness:  
> the truth more first than sun more last than star
> 
> —do lovers love? why then to heaven with hell.  
> Whatever sages say and fools, all’s well
> 
> — e.e. cummings
> 
> PS: dancinbutterfly and I have laughed multiple times over my inability to write a fic where Boyd and Raylan _don't_ get together as teenagers. "One day you will write that fic," she always says, "but today is not that day." So today is that day! dancinbutterfly, this unresolved sexual tension is for you. ;)


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